Cerise Phiv (張俐紫)

This month, we celebrate the passing of the seasons and in preparing for the arrival of spring with its deluge of transformations, hopes and renewal. In search of a different evocation of spring, I stumbled on a poem by Mallarme...

I met Fr. Bob Ronald when I started to work at eRenlai in 2007. I was then the network animator of the website and he was our English editor. Although we shared the same office and we were seeing each other everyday, I realised only after his passing that I had just begun to know him.

eRenlai and the Taipei Ricci Institute (TRI) have decided to launch a new volunteering scheme. The plethora of different events, awards conferences, publications and works that our organisation churns out annually means that there are always plenty of exciting opportunities, to learn some skills in the most dynamic, prestigious and creatively stimulating of organisations. We work in publishing, new media, writing, journalism, camera and soundwork, video editing, documentary film production, event organisation, academic conferences environmental or sustainability work and the arts... Working with eRenlai and TRI you are given proximity to the top academics, feature journalists and event organisers, eRenlai even has its own in-house art directors and fully equipped video editing studio. If you are interested in participating in eRenlai's volunteering scheme. Please This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Tell us a bit about yourself, why you want to volunteer and what fields you are interested in.

Whilst we are willing to take on internees year round and allow for various interests, some current areas of interest are:

Flash animation and video design

Subtitling and video editing

Journalism

Languages

For more info, email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

José Maria Prazeres Pós-de-Mina is the Mayor of Moura, Portugal, who oversaw the building of what was the biggest solar power plant in the world, in a town of just 16,500 people. This led to Moura being a net exporter of sustainable energy.

Will cities and local communities take the lead when it comes to mitigation action against climate change? This was the definite lesson of a summit held in Xinbei City (formerly Taipei County) on November 8-9 2010.

Crazy is a documentary on memory and on the way one deals with the memory of traumatic experiences. In her movie, Heddy Honigmann interviews a series of Dutch soldiers who have all experience in a war context as members of the UN forces/army. The movie is remarkable for its use of documents such as photo scrapbooks, news footage and personal films, letters and postcards… The interviewees are most of the time comfortably sitting in their living room, or in a restaurant. Sometimes they are accompanied by their spouse or companion as they recount their experience of wars in various parts of the world such as Lebanon, Rwanda and Yugoslavia.

Thus the contrast is even stronger between the violence and horror of their stories and the environment and items that surround them now: a cozy and bright room, a park, an expensive bottle of wine… What Honigmann succeeds in capturing is precisely the moment of the recollection, this indescribable moment when a painful or traumatic memory mightily comes back, bringing to the present a past that one might have shut off.

So there are two kinds of memory: a voluntary one and an uncontrolled one. The first one comes from the effort of remembering, it also rebuilds a story, gives an order and a signification to events. It is also the one that overcomes in a certain way the absurdities and the horrors of the war by choosing carefully what one wants or can remember. For instance, a soldier evokes the refugee camps in Rwanda: when asked if it was terrible to see, he just replies that one gets used to it; he’s then asked how quickly he got used to it, very fast, he says, as for the horror scenes he could have witnessed, he just brushed them aside, using what he calls the “blinders’ technique”. In his role as a strong and efficient soldier, he denies having showed any weak feeling during his mission, for him, it is a matter of survival.

On the other hand, Honigmann also invokes another kind of memory aroused by music in her movie. Each soldier is asked to introduce a song linked to their experience of war time. From the Stabat Mater by Pergolesito Guns n' Roses' "Knocking on Heaven's Door", the soldiers all used a song of their own to find a bit of peace and comfort in a context of violence and dehumanization. So the camera just films them as they are sitting on their home sofa listening to these songs that carry such a heavy recollection. They stop talking but their silence is even more eloquent than all the stories they just told, eyes begin to float, sweat beads on their foreheads, hands are twisted together as if supplicating under the torture… And in fact, the special signification that these different songs carry for all the protagonists reveal precisely the banality of horror and the way craziness arises from the trivial.

This importance of music and its power of reminiscence have been evoked before in French novelist Celine’s “Journey to the End of Night” (Voyage au bout de la nuit). The novel also describes the absurdities of war and its impact on the mind as the story starts with the narrator enrolling for First World War after following the gay music played by a brass band! In fact Celine’s book is punctuated by music: the author himself named his writing “the little music”; describing the decay of age as the moment when “one has no more music inside to make life dance.” In another quote, the narrator says: “In fact, nobody resists to music. We have nothing to do with our heart, we give it gladly. Y’have to hear at the bottom of all music the tune without notes, made for us, the tune of Death.”

A recent survey conducted by the Research development and Evaluation Commission in Taiwan gave some ‘positive’ results regarding the progress of gender equality in Taiwanese society: for example, approximately 86% of respondents said that men and women should share equal responsibilities at work and at home while 80% “disagreed with the idea that men should be the master at home and women should obey them”.

To what extent are these opinions reflected by reality? Actually, the 2010 figures published by the Service of Accounting and Statistics of the Executive Yuan are not so bad: they show improvement in the decreasing of inequalities between men and women in the work environment in terms of salary difference as an example or even unemployment rate. But in 2009 there were also 1.5 more women working in a part-time job than men and only 17% of the parental leave allowances were taken by men.

So how much real improvement do these figures really show? In a context of economic recession, it doesn’t seem so surprising that the majority of people would think men and women can do the same amount of work. In the West, women only obtained the right to vote after having shown how necessary and efficient they were to keep the society and the economy functioning in the absence of the men (out on the front line). It is often in times of crisis that a society is pushed to find solutions and adapt. But shouldn’t we be looking for more preventive solutions than just patchwork?

Furthermore, polls are interesting themselves in the terminology they use. I was actually more surprised by the questions than the results, as the way the questions were asked are quite indicative of how conservative Taiwanese society still is in 2010:

In regards to traditional perception of social roles, 80% of the people surveyed disagreed with the “men should be the leader in the home, and women should try their best to obey their husbands” concept. Moreover, 68% of the interviewees disagreed with the “to carry on the bloodline, one must give birth to a son” tradition, and roughly 60% of them disagreed with the notion of “it is men’s responsibility to bring in income, and women should stay home to take care of the family.” Concerning the idea of “calling both sides of grandparents as ‘grandparents’ in the future,” 50% of the respondents approved while 44% of them disapproved.

Being a magazine makes eRenlai different from any blog site. We select and edit contributions for clarity and quality. So, do send us your contribution, it will be given the space and credit it deserves! We are looking in a special way for stories, reactions and essays by readers' groups, associations, and local communities. Our ambition is to encourage all of us to think and act as a network, growing in solidarity and enjoying our diversity.

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